Starter Kit. Idea 212 of 500. Cluster 10
Tea-bag manufacturing with compostable bags, since most of the world's are plastic
The mechanism, from the book
The Colombo auction sells tea by the lot to a buyer who blends it under his own name. Every step after the auction is where the money is, and every step can be done here by somebody who is not a plantation company.
The first step
Buy a small quantity of compostable bag material from a supplier, fill 100 bags by hand with a named estate's tea, and ask 5 tea exporters or hotel buyers whether a compostable bag would change their order. Ask each what premium, if any, they would pay per thousand bags. The proof is a price and one buyer willing to trial a carton.
- Who pays first
- A tea packer or hotel group that is being asked by its own customers to get plastic out of the cup and has no local supplier.
- What leaves today
- Tea is bagged abroad or with imported materials, so both the bagging margin and the answer to the plastic problem sit outside the island.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tea Board. Ask whether tea packed in compostable bags needs any approval for export.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask how a compostable claim on a tea bag can be tested and certified.
Check before you spend
Whether your bag material is certified compostable in the market you sell to, and whether that claim may be printed on the box.
Find out these three numbers
- What do exporters pay per thousand for the bags they use now?
- What does compostable bag material cost per thousand bags?
- Which buyers abroad have dropped plastic bags already?
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.